I don't know about it working that well. On my Mac, iTunes functions OK, but still sometimes doesn't catch that I have an iPod Shuffle [1] plugged in. On my PC, same. Sometimes I have to unplug it from the cradle then, plug it back in for it to be detected. Of course, what is irksome about iTunes is the fact that moving a library from one location to another is such a PITA. On the Mac, I can do a symlink, but on the PC, it is tough to move the MP3 stash to another drive, and keep play counts and other metadata.

[1]: The Shuffle is ideal for one thing. It does well in a pants pocket and with no LCD, no worries about it getting too damaged by keys. Its inexpensive enough to where if it gets lost or ripped off, it won't be a big loss.

When Microsoft's URGE music service closed shop and moved to Rhapsody (Real's music service), I was pretty irritated. Windows Media Player, though not perfect, is a pretty decent player. To boot, URGE had an excellent genre of metal with good articles about new bands from MTV (ironic that), while Rhapsody just lumped it in as a also-run under generic "rock".

Cancelling Rhapsody was a PITA... you can't just click "cancel account". You have to call an 800 number, deal with a queue, and deal with an offshore call center whose sole purpose in life is to keep you from cancelling.

I do miss Microsoft's music service, it was probably the only one that did justice to genres other than the usual predigested mainstream stuff.

Foobar2000 is the answer...I ditched iTunes when that included safari as an option in all the updates...If I wanted safari, I would have gotten it...it pushed me over the edge, and I haven't looked back.

Okay, so I was a little frustrated when I typed that up. If you couldn't tell by the time of the post (4:41AM for the "busy"), I was trying to get my iPod Touch set up with my music, which is on a network share (Windows file server, i.e. SMB mounted). Unfortunately, iTunes performs abysmally with music on remote locations.

Adding the music to the library isn't where the lag is; it's during post-processing. It automatically determines gapless playback information, which takes FOREVER on its own. Afterwards, it processes artwork for each song, which can take a LONG time depending on the size of your collection. On top of that, dragging thousands of files onto playlists or devices takes a while (the DRAGGING!).

When I use Winamp, it would ONLY add the music files to the database. It didn't do album art adding (natively), nor did it analyze the gaps in your music (since it had gapless playback support since FOREVER). You did what you wanted afterwards. It was fast, even on slower computers. Adding music to my iPod was just as fast, since it didn't do black box operations behind the scenes.

iTunes is okay (JUST okay), but it would be nice if it played well with networked libraries.

You're friends are morons, i'm afraid. I've never liked how iTunes plays the songs (the mechanics of it, MusicMatch was much better---playlists on the go, iTunes sucks)...but it runs fine. Sadly, since Yahoo bought Musicmatch and than raped it to death...i would go so far as to say that iTunes is the best option.